Nessus security tool closes its source

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Not a GPL problem at all.

It's a problem with human nature. People are inherantly self-serving. This is what many of the most ardent supporters of the GPL either don't get or conveniently ignore when they promote the Free Software Movement. It's a good concept, but unfortunately, in the real world, many times it just doesn't work like it's supposed to.

I have to wonder if a more open license might have actually brought in more contributions. Consider this. With the GPL license, lots of people used nessus, and a few companies even adopted it and made money off of it...but contributions were still near zero. With a more open license, adoption by companies would almost certainly be much higher. This might have led to more contributions coming back. Perhaps these contributions would be at the expense of other people making more money off of nessus, but that doesn't neccesarily mean lost money by the original nessus creator. Then again it might not have, bit history had shown that projects like Apache, and BSD have not been "killed off" by their extremely open licenses.

The sure fire way to keep others from profiting from your work is to close it up. The author of nessus recognized the fact that the benfits of his product being open sourced (and when I say open sourced, I am not singling out the GPL) simply were not there, and he took the action he deemed appropriate.

Posted by: toadlife   Posted on: 10/06/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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